Reaching Beyond Earth's Atmosphere

Weekly Space Blog 9/14

We are back again with our weekly blog and what a week it has been for space news.

Voyager has left the Solar SystemThis week the Voyager Science Team announced that the long serving Voyager 1 spacecraft had left the solar system, making it the first human made object to achieve the feat. As one of the team said this is a milestone as significant as Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon.

36 years in the making and 12 billion miles from home the Voyager 1 spacecraft has already provided us with a wealthy of information from it’s flyby’s of Jupiter and Saturn and from it’s journey through several layers of the outer solar system.

So what is next for Voyager 1, the spacecraft itself has enough power to keep the current science instruments running for a few more years, at that point the science team will begin to power down different instruments until they are all silent. The spacecraft will still have enough power to operate for a number of years after that but will only be able to return engineering data on the health of the craft. Once the spacecraft has run out of power it will continue it’s journey towards AC+79 3888, a star in the constellation of Camelopardalis in about 40,000 years from now.

For more information on the Voyager spacecraft check out there mission page here.

SpaceX Falcon 9 v1.1 NewsThis week SpaceX performed the first Static Fire of the new Falcon 9 v1.1 at their Vandenberg launch pad. SpaceX CEO tweeted later in the day that they had achieved full thrust for 2 seconds during the test, however due to some anomalies found during the test they will be performing another test on Saturday 9/14 and will announce a new launch date once the data has been analyzed.

Orbital Approaches LaunchThe first operational Cygnus spacecraft rolled out to the launch pad this week for a 9/17 launch to the International Space Station, this will be the final test launch of the Antares and Cygnus vehicles under the COTS program for NASA. Assuming nothing goes wrong Orbital will then begin commercial resupply missions to the station to augment those provided by SpaceX currently.

Japan’s Epsilon Launched Successfully
Following an aborted countdown recently, Japan successfully launched there new Epsilon rocket this week. The new rocket which has been designed to make launches cheaper and more efficient completed it’s first launch by placing a compact telescope into orbit.

Well that is all for this week, a short post but more to come next week